Behavioral Measures of Attention and Cognitive Control During a New Auditory Working Memory Paradigm

Proactive control is the ability to manipulate and maintain goal-relevant information within working memory (WM), allowing individuals to selectively attend to important information while inhibiting irrelevant distractions. Deficits in proactive control may cause multiple cognitive impairments seen in schizophrenia. However, studies of cognitive control have largely relied on visual tasks, even though functional deficits in schizophrenia are more frequent and severe in the auditory domain (i.e., hallucinations). Hence, we developed an auditory analog of a visual Ignore/Suppress paradigm. Healthy adults (N=40) listened to a series of 4 letters (600-ms SOA) presented alternately to each ear, followed by a 3.2-s maintenance interval and a probe. Participants were directed to either selectively ignore (I) to-be-presented letters to one ear, suppress (S) letters already presented to one ear, or remember (R) all presented letters. The critical cue was provided either before (I) or after (S) the encoding series, or simultaneously with the probe (R). Probes were encoding items presented to the attended/not suppressed ear (“Valid”), the ignored/suppressed ear (“Lure”), or not presented (“Control”). Replicating prior findings during visual Ignore/Suppress tasks, response sensitivity and latency revealed poorer performance for Lure than Control trials, particularly during the Suppress condition. Shorter Suppress than Remember latencies suggested a behavioral advantage when discarding encoded items from WM. Paradigm-related internal consistencies and 1-week test-retest reliabilities (n=38) were good to excellent. Findings validate these auditory WM tasks as a reliable manipulation of proactive control and set the stage for studies with schizophrenia patients who experience auditory hallucinations.